Comment by Scott Alexander

I think if we were to implement a Basic Income Guarantee we might save more money in psychiatric care than we think – since we compete with the prison system to be the warehouse for people who can’t make it out in the world and nobody knows what to do with. It might produce some of the same kind of savings as giving the homeless people houses. If I got fired because we’d solved all the problems relating to poverty, and the population of seriously mentally ill people was too small to support the current number of psychiatrists, that would be a pretty neat way to go. AI Verified source (2015)